My never-ending fascination with Google results continues. Right now, I’m number 8 when you Google for “always be closing”. Probably not the link people are looking for, there. What’s worse, Google returns my trackback and comment links rather than the actual blog entry. Suboptimal.
I learned about this effect from Phil Ringnalda, who has some extensive thoughts on the topic. I note that I do have single page entry archives with the title of the entry in the
tag, and Google still likes my TrackBack and comment pages more than the main entry page, so I don’t think Phil’s quite gotten to the bottom of the topic. Still, he’s mostly on target. Similarly, while <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30621.html">Andrew Orlowski</a> is mostly off-base, and is certainly ranting, he does pinpoint an issue Google needs to deal with.</p>
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<div class="comment-meta"><a href="http://www.snowplow.org/martin/" rel="nofollow external" class="comment-author">Daniel Martin</a><time datetime="2003-05-13T01:57:00Z" class="comment-date">
May 13, 2003
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<p>Playing with google is fun. A few months ago, I decided to always link to the same page with my name when I leave comments on an MT page. It's worked, as noted in my most recent livejournal post. (http://www.livejournal.com/users/dtm/7990.html)</p>
<p>I should note that I didn't deliberately try to google-bomb as such, I just applied my name and url consistently to my comments. That's the only explanation I have for my rise in the rankings.</p>
<p>This gets better - anyone wanting to take over a name on google just has to post comments to widely discussed blog entries under that name linking to that site. For example, one could create an alternate ego called, say, "Scientology Exposed" and post comments on several hot blog topics (which would be easy to find with any of those sites that tell you what's currently on the various blogs) linking to <a href="http://www.xenu.net/." rel="nofollow">http://www.xenu.net/.</a> Admittedly, you'd be going up against some truly dedicated google-bombers, but you could probably get loads of help by posting the idea to alt.religion.scientology.</p>
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